Forgive The Inexcusable

It helps me to know where these words began. They come from a short piece by C.S. Lewis usually called “On Forgiveness”, written in 1947 for a parish magazine, the kind of small church publication most people never see. It is barely more than a thousand words, and Lewis sent it off to a parish priest rather than to a publisher. It only reached a wide readership long after he died, eventually gathered into the collection your source names, The Weight of Glory.

That origin matters to me. This is not Lewis the celebrated Oxford don performing for a crowd. It is a believer trying to be honest with ordinary churchgoers about something most of us find nearly unbearable in practice. Lewis had come to faith only in his thirties, after years as an atheist, and he never wrote about Christian living as a man who found it easy. He writes about forgiveness the way a fellow patient might describe a treatment he is still undergoing, not the way a doctor describes a cure he has mastered. I trust him more for that.

The hinge of the whole quote is a distinction we blur constantly, and the short reflection already names it. I want to press on the actual words, because the difference is not pedantic. To excuse a wrong is to say there was, after all, a good reason for it, and that the person was not really to blame. To forgive is the opposite move. It starts by admitting there is no good reason, that the person genuinely is to blame, and it releases them anyway.

Notice what that means. The two acts cannot land on the same wrong at once. If I have truly excused something, I have not forgiven it, because there is nothing left to forgive. Forgiveness only switches on at the exact point where excuse-making fails. Lewis sets the word “inexcusable” in the sentence on purpose. He is not reaching for drama. He means the thing you cannot explain away, the wound that stays a wound. That is the only place real forgiveness ever has work to do, and it is why it costs what it costs.

What anchors the saying for me is that Lewis is not inventing a clever paradox. He is drawing out something Jesus put into the prayer he gave us. In Matthew 6 the Lord ties our being forgiven to our forgiving others, and a few verses on he says it again plainly: if we will not forgive, neither will our Father forgive us. Lewis took that as gravely as it is meant.

The scripture your source echoes, Ephesians 4:32, points the same way, calling us to forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us. The pattern is always God first, then us. Jesus told a whole parable about it in Matthew 18, the servant let off an impossible debt who then seizes a fellow servant over a trifling one. The point is never that our forgiving earns God’s forgiveness. It is that mercy received is meant to flow on through us, and a heart that clamps shut on others has not yet felt the weight of its own debt cancelled. Lewis simply hands that truth back in a single sentence.

Forgiveness rarely behaves like a clean transaction, and the source already mentions Lewis finding old resentment surface again long after he thought the matter settled. I will not repeat that ground so much as stand where it leaves us. When the grievance climbs back into the room, dragged in by a smell or a song or an offhand remark, the question is what you do with it.

I used to assume the return of resentment proved the first forgiveness had been fake. I now think the resurfacing is not failure but the next instalment falling due. You forgive again, and you may keep paying it down for years. What steadies me is exactly where Lewis tells me to begin, not with the size of what someone owes me, but with the size of what I owed God and owe no longer. When I genuinely remember my own inexcusable things, the ones quietly cancelled, my grip on another person’s debt tends to loosen by itself. Not because the wrong shrank, but because mercy got there first.

I find it clarifying to ask a blunt question. Where does the wrong actually go when I forgive it? It does not evaporate. A debt that is cancelled is still a real loss, only now the person owed agrees to carry it rather than collect it. That is what gives forgiveness its cost. When I forgive, I am the one who absorbs the difference. The hurt stays mine, but I stop sending the invoice.

This is the shape of what Lewis points at in the second half of his sentence. God forgiving the inexcusable in us was never a cheap waving away of the bill. The whole weight of it landed somewhere, on the cross, and the New Testament keeps saying as much (Colossians 2:13 to 14 speaks of the record of our debt being nailed there). So when I baulk at the cost of releasing someone, it steadies me to remember I am being asked for a small version of something already done for me at enormous expense. Not to pretend the debt was nothing. To pay it down myself, out of mercy I did not earn.

I will be honest about how this actually goes for me. There is one old grievance I can summon in seconds, and when sleep will not come I catch myself building the case all over again, lining up the evidence, rehearsing what I should have said. The verdict is always the same and always in my favour. In those hours I am not weighing whether to forgive. I am enjoying being right.

What Lewis helps me see is that this is not the same as keeping the wound honest. There is a counterfeit that wears forgiveness as a mask, the brisk “oh, it was fine, do not worry about it” that buries the thing alive instead of letting it go. Pretending it was fine and forgiving it are opposite moves. One says nothing happened. The other says something did happen, it was genuinely wrong, and I release you from it anyway. The two in the morning courtroom is at least honest that a wrong occurred. The harder next step is to read the verdict out and then tear it up.

One thing is worth saying plainly, because the quote can be misheard. To forgive someone is not automatically to trust them again, or to behave as though nothing was ever broken. Releasing a debt and rebuilding a relationship are two different works, and they move at different speeds. You can genuinely forgive a person you will never safely sit in a room with. As I read him, Lewis is pointing at the inner release, the decision before God to stop holding the wrong against someone, not a duty to hand yourself back into harm.

I labour this because tender, conscientious people sometimes hear “forgive the inexcusable” and conclude they must therefore pretend the danger was never real, or return to someone who has not changed. That is not what the sentence asks. Forgiveness can be complete while wisdom keeps a door shut. Mercy and prudence are not enemies. Often the most honest thing of all is to forgive a person fully and still, with a clear conscience, keep a careful distance. The debt is cancelled. That does not oblige you to lend again.

Faced with a sentence this costly, we go hunting for the wound behind it, and we would rather like the wound to have a name. I cannot give you one. I do not know whose face Lewis saw when he wrote “inexcusable”, and I have never met anyone who could tell me.

What I can say is that he was not writing from a quiet study with the door shut. The household at the Kilns in those years included Janie Moore, the elderly mother of a friend killed in the First World War, whom Lewis had taken into his care long before and who lived under his roof until near the end of her life. I am not saying she is who he meant. I have no idea, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing in a pleasant voice. My claim is the modest one: whatever he had in view, the sentence came from inside a real house with real people in it, and not from above the weather.

That changes what I hear him arguing with. He is not squaring up to a heresy. He is aiming at something perfectly respectable and, in my experience, almost universal: the belief that forgiveness is basically time plus perspective. Wait long enough, see their side, and the thing dissolves on its own. Lewis will not have it. If a grievance only needed patience, it was never inexcusable to begin with, and what you did was not forgiveness. You waited it out. I have done that for years and called it grace.

I read this line for years before the small word in the middle got hold of me. He did not write that a Christian ought to forgive the inexcusable, or that a mature Christian eventually manages it. He wrote that to be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable. That is not advice. It is a definition, and definitions have no opt-out clause for hard cases.

I resisted that, and I still feel the pull to. Make it a target and I get to be a Christian who is falling short, which is a comfortable enough address to live at. Make it a definition and the floor moves. If the word itself contains this, then the unforgiveness I am quietly preserving is not a weak patch in my discipleship. It is a question about the whole thing.

What keeps that from crushing me is the second half of the sentence, and it is why I have come to love the line rather than dread it. He does not say forgive the inexcusable and then you will be a Christian. He says because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. The definition rests on something already done, in the past tense, before I was asked for anything at all. So it is not an entrance exam. It is closer to being told which family you are in, and then watching the family resemblance take its slow time showing up on your own face. That is a very different sort of pressure. It still presses. But it presses from behind, not from in front.

Here is the misuse I actually commit, rather than the ones I enjoy condemning in other people. I take this enormous sentence and spend it on a delayed train. On the colleague who talked over me. On my brother, late again. Then I feel rather good about myself, because look, I forgave the inexcusable, the way C.S. Lewis said.

None of it was inexcusable. All of it was excusable and I duly excused it, which is the one move Lewis says is not forgiveness at all. The traffic was bad. She was under pressure. He has always been like that. Every one of those is an excuse, and every one let me keep my temper without spending anything. I have been buying grace at a discount for years and filing the receipt under sanctification.

The test is horribly simple. Is there a reason? Then be patient, and understand that there is nothing to forgive yet. Is there genuinely no reason, none at all, and does the wrong sit there deserving every hard thing you would like to say about it? Then Lewis is talking to you, and the price goes up accordingly. We are not exempt either. It is the easiest thing in the world for a site like this one to lay this line over a photograph of a calm lake and let you read it as a soothing thought. It is not a soothing thought. It is an invoice somebody has agreed to pay in full.

Let me say where I think this line is weak, because it is not scripture and it does not need me to defend it to the death.

As a general account of what Christian forgiveness is, I think it is exactly right. But there are people I have never been able to hand it to. A mother whose child was killed. Someone hurt for years, as a child, by the adult who was meant to be the safe one in the house. I do not know whether Lewis ever set his sentence against wrongs of that size. I have not seen him do it, and I am not going to dress up my not having seen it as a finding. What I do know is that a true sentence can be the wrong thing to say to somebody on a Tuesday afternoon in a hospital corridor. Truth has timing. Quoting Lewis at a person in that state is not ministry. It is tidiness, and it is usually for the comfort of the one doing the quoting.

There is a second thing in the logic worth staring at rather than nodding through. God forgave the inexcusable in you, therefore you must forgive the inexcusable in them. I believe that. I have also watched it wound people twice, once by the original wrong and once by the room’s impatience that they are not over it yet. The sentence describes a shape. It sets no deadline, and whoever reads a stopwatch into it has added something that is simply not there in the words.

I have seen this line cut down to five words: forgive the inexcusable. Take away “because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you” and you have not shortened Lewis’s sentence, you have unplugged it. What is left sounds like advice about your blood pressure, a technique you are meant to work up out of your own reserves. It also swivels you the wrong way round. The full sentence turns your eyes onto your own cancelled debt first; the cropped version leaves you staring at the person who hurt you, told to produce something you have no supply of. Same words, opposite direction.

And the half that survives the crop is always the demanding half. Nobody prints the mercy on a mug. The order in Lewis is debt, then mercy, then the strength to pass it on, and that order is the whole mechanism. What is left when you cut the second half away is not a smaller Lewis. It is an instruction with the fuel line pulled out, which is exactly why it feels so heavy in the hand.

Read it again and see who it is talking to. Entirely the person who was wronged. Not one word asks anything of the one who did the wronging: no confession, no change, no admission that the harm even happened. That is not a fault in it. Lewis was writing about our side of the ledger and never pretended otherwise. But a silence that large can be picked up and used as a lever, and I have watched it happen. Someone says gently that a Christian forgives the inexcusable, and the room agrees, and the matter is closed, and at no point has anybody asked the one who caused the harm for so much as the truth.

This is not the same complaint as impatience about how long forgiveness takes. It is about direction. Whether a wrong owes justice, or a process, or a plain acknowledgement said out loud before forgiveness is even sought, the sentence cannot tell you. Those questions are real and this line answers none of them. Anyone who reaches for it to hush a person still waiting for the truth to be spoken has borrowed an authority Lewis never gave it to lend.

The second half assumes something I do not reliably have: a settled sense that God has actually forgiven me. Lewis stands the whole argument on that ground as though it were the one thing you could count on underfoot. For long stretches of my life it has not been. I believed the doctrine. I could have taught it on a whiteboard. I simply could not find the feeling of it anywhere, and the guilt sat there regardless of what was said to be settled.

Ask someone in that state to forgive out of mercy already received and you are asking them to pour from a jug they are not sure was ever filled. I do not think this breaks the sentence. I think it shows it is not the first thing to hand a person. Sometimes the honest order is a friend, and scripture read slowly rather than quoted at speed, and time, and only then Lewis. Nobody can spend a certainty they have not yet been given.

I would happily never again hear this quotation open a talk. Put it first and everything after it arrives as evidence for Lewis, with scripture in the witness box backing up a famous man’s summary. Turn it round. Read the parable in Matthew 18 first, the servant let off a debt he could never have paid who walks straight out and takes a colleague by the throat over pocket money. Let the room sit with the size of that first debt long enough to be uncomfortable about it. Then say the sentence.

Used that way it drops like a match onto something already laid, a sharp naming of what people have just felt in the text for themselves. Used the other way round it is a slogan with scripture hung on it for decoration. The difference is not academic. I have sat in both rooms, and I can tell you which one I walked out of still thinking about the person I have not forgiven.

• Is there a wrong I keep trying to excuse, telling myself it was not so bad, when the harder and freer thing on offer is to forgive it instead?
• When my forgiveness of someone keeps coming undone, can I treat that as the next instalment to hand over, rather than proof that I failed?
• What are the inexcusable things in my own life that were cancelled all the same, and when did I last let myself feel the weight of that?
• Who comes to mind at the word “inexcusable”, and am I willing to start today not with their debt to me but with mine to God?

If it would help to keep sitting with this, you might read more from C.S. Lewis or look at what Scripture itself says in our Bible verses about forgiveness.